Ancient units of measurement

Amanda Feilding, Countess of Wemyss and March, also known as Lady Neidpath, sits cross-legged on a bench on a tiny island at the center of an artificial pond in her English country estate, a 15-minute drive outside of Oxford. At her feet is a tiny pure-white cloud of a dog, which traipses around chewing on the grass, only occasionally coughing it up. Feilding is 75 years old. She wears a black skirt and knee-high boots and grips a tan shawl around her shoulders, on account of this being a gray November morning. From her ears hang jewelry that looks like green rock candy. Her light brown hair is frizzy but not altogether unkempt. In the distance, peeking over a towering hedge, is her castle, built in the 1520s. “In the ’60s we called it Brainblood Hall,” she says in a posh accent that periodically turns sing-songy and high, à la Julia Child. “We always saw it as the masthead from where this change would happen.” This change being the de-villainization … [Read more...] about Inside the Mind of the Countess of Psychedelic Science

A decline in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels led to a fundamental shift in the behaviour of the Earth's climate system around one million years ago, according to new research led by the University of Southampton. A team of international scientists used new geochemical measurements, coupled with a model of the 'Earth system', to show that the growth and changing nature of continental ice sheets, approximately a million years ago, coincided with a cascade of events that ultimately lowered atmospheric CO2 during glacial intervals - periods when the Earth experienced extreme cold. The researchers have shown this change was key in triggering what is known as the Mid-Pleistocene Transition (MPT), which lasted around 400,000 years. The MPT had long lasting effects on the frequency at which the Earth transitioned between periods of warm and cold climate, (the 'ice age cycles'). Findings of the study are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. For much … [Read more...] about Decline in atmospheric carbon dioxide key to ancient climate transition

The guest book at the nondescript pair of warehouses just across the street from the monumental blimp hangar at NASA's Moffett Federal Airfield in Mountain View, Calif., looks like a Who's Who of the computer industry. There's Gene Amdahl, who designed two generations of mainframes at IBM Corp. and another two at his own companies; C. Gordon Bell, who built the minicomputers that powered Digital Equipment Corp.; and Donald Knuth, whose algorithms have set standards in computer science for 40 years. These and the other pioneers who prowl Moffett come to visit their brainchildren—or to find a home for them. "Anyone who's anyone in the computer industry and is getting on in years" has come to reminisce or to donate, says curator Mike Williams. Known as the Computer History Museum, the collection here spans a "unique period" in the history of technology, says veteran computer architect and museum board member John Mashey. Fifty years ago, there were essentially no computers; now they … [Read more...] about The Ghosts of Computers Past

Note: Because aviators worldwide specify altitude and separation requirements in nautical miles and feet, those units have been retained in this article rather than converted to their metric equivalents, as is IEEE Spectrum's policy. By the year 2015, if the U.S. air transportation system does not change in any significant way, there could be a major aviation accident every seven to 10 days. This projection, reported by Neil Planzer, director of Air Traffic System Requirements Service for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Washington, D.C., is based on the anticipated growth of air traffic, combined with an accident rate that has been statistically flat for the past 15 years and, without much effort, is expected to remain at that level [ Fig. 1]. Planzer made the projection in May at the "Communicating for Safety" Conference in Chandler, Ariz. Because weekly accidents are well beyond what a traveling public is willing to tolerate; and because the current air traffic control … [Read more...] about In Search of the Future of Air Traffic Control

Editor’s Picks Can Nanotechnology Provide Relief in Rare Earth Resource Squeeze? Nanomagnets to the Rescue The Rare-Earth-Metal Bottleneck In ancient times, they were considered magical objects with supernatural powers. These days, we just stick them on our refrigerators. Yet those little magnets deserve our admiration more than ever. Take laptop computers, with their slim hard drives. It became possible to manufacture the motors for those drives only after the development of especially powerful permanent magnets in the … [Read more...] about The Incredible Pull of Nanocomposite Magnets

Oxygen has provided a breath of fresh air to the study of the Earth's evolution some 400-plus million years ago. A team of researchers, including a faculty member and postdoctoral fellow from Washington University in St. Louis, found that oxygen levels appear to increase at about the same time as a three-fold increase in biodiversity during the Ordovician Period, between 445 and 485 million years ago, according to a study published Nov. 20 in Nature Geoscience. "This oxygenation is supported by two approaches that are mostly independent from each other, using different sets of geochemical records and predicting the same amount of oxygenation occurred at roughly the same time as diversification," said Cole Edwards, the principal investigator of a study conducted when he was a postdoctoral fellow in the lab under the paper's senior author, David Fike, associate professor in Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts & Sciences. The other authors are Matthew Saltzman of Ohio State … [Read more...] about Rise in oxygen levels links to ancient explosion of life, researchers find

Electricity surrounds us. Whether in the grids of power cables blanketing every developed nation, or the currents coursing through the human bloodstream to keep the heart beating, electricity drives our lives. It has powered the great advances of the last century and the hunger for more — and a more efficient — means of generating electricity is always growing. Generating the massive wattage that powers the globe is no small task, especially considering it requires ravenous consumption of resources like coal and gas. Natural resources are finite, however, and the processes of extracting and using them are often destructive. As technology advances and the global population swells, clean and renewable energy will become the holy grail. Avenues of research into renewable energy include methods such as cold fusion, but for the time being these are pipe dreams. There exists, however, a great and terrible source of energy which, if not limitless, will likely … [Read more...] about Stealing Apollo’s chariot: the inner workings of solar panels

Life Sciences Every autumn, as the days grow shorter, an ancient foe―seasonal influenza―reemerges to cause morbidity and mortality. The most common influenza symptoms include fever, runny nose, sore throat, muscle pain, headache, coughing, and fatigue. While many people are able to recover from influenza, certain subpopulations (young children, pregnant women, and the elderly) face elevated risk of serious complications. Underscoring the burden of this disease, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that influenza has resulted in between 9.2 million and 35.6 million illnesses, between 140,000 and 710,000 hospitalizations, and between 12,000 and 56,000 deaths annually since 2010.Several factors complicate physicians’ ability to prevent and treat influenza outbreaks. To date, only two classes of drugs have been approved to treat influenza—M2 blockers (e.g., amantadine and rimantadine) and neuramindase inhibitors (e.g., oseltamivir … [Read more...] about Modeling Influenza Virology and Pharmacology: Emerging Weapons Against an Ancient Foe

HPC Fermi Measures Cosmic 'Fog' Produced by Ancient StarlightThis image is taken from an animation that tracks several gamma rays through space and time, from their emission in the jet of a distant blazar to their arrival in Fermi's Large Area Telescope (LAT). During their journey, the number of randomly moving ultraviolet and optical photons (blue) increases as more and more stars are born in the universe. Eventually, one of the gamma rays encounters a photon of starlight and the gamma ray transforms into an electron and a positron. The remaining gamma-ray photons arrive at Fermi, interact with tungsten plates in the LAT, and produce the electrons and positrons whose paths through the detector allows astronomers to backtrack the gamma rays to their source. Courtesy of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Cruz deWildeAstronomers using data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have made the most accurate measurement of starlight in the universe and used it to establish the total … [Read more...] about Fermi Measures Cosmic ‘Fog’ Produced by Ancient Starlight

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers have conducted a series of laboratory and field experiments that explore the effects of adding biochar, a porous charcoal that looks like black landscaping bark, to the soil to limit the cesium (Cs) uptake into foods grown in the Marshall Islands.From 1946 to 1958, the United States tested 67 nuclear weapons at Bikini and Enewetak Atoll in the northern Marshall Islands. As a result, the radioactive fallout contaminated the area.Lawrence Livermore scientists continue to provide radiological protection monitoring of local inhabitants and the environment in the Marshall Islands. Key program research directives are to build a strong technical and scientific foundation to help support safe and sustainable resettlement programs and improve food safety and security.To stop the transfer of cesium-137 (a fission product from the nuclear tests) into the food chain, the team added biochar to soil on the islands to help reduce the … [Read more...] about Charcoal Could Limit Uptake of Radioactive Elements into Marshall Islands Food Chain